@MSH
I'm sorry, uh, what?
There are piles of evidence that the Holodomor was planned by the Soviet Union government to starve out and destroy the "kulaks" in Ukraine that resisted collectivization. There was no "mismanagement" of the crisis, the management
was the crisis. You think what happened during collectivization was a force of
nature? Entire grain stores,
everything was forcibly taken, and all this bread that Lenin and Stalin promised somehow never materialized. Soldiers were specifically told to target people that
didn't seem to be starving and accuse them of hiding food. There were
guards posted along the roads to make sure no one was able to get to the cities where there was more food. There's
absolutely no way you can spin this to say "it was just an aCcIdEnT!" I don't care if the
goal was
ethnic cleansing, because that's just what ended up happening anyway, and everyone involved with orchestrating it was abundantly clear on what was going to happen. It doesn't matter if you in some twisted way somehow think this terror was for "progress!!", this was absolutely
evil.
Kulaks were not exploitative bourgeoisie. They were
peasants, farming peasants, who happened to have several more acres than their neighbors, or a couple cows, who were just a little bit wary of giving up everything they ever owned to this mysterious, violent force hundreds of miles away which just murdered thousands of dissidents and resistors to the revolution. And yet they were treated like dogs, starved, and brutalized.
Saying that this was not a genocide because it was "not [originally] about ethnicity!" is pedantic
bullshit. It killed 7 million civilians at the hands of their government.
Second of all, please fact-check what you seem to think about the Holodomor's death toll.
Data is easily available. It's second on that list of genocides by the highest estimate (which is still lower than some estimates), after the Germans' treatment of Soviet forces, which was during wartime EDIT: corrected:
and mostly involved Soviet combatants (many of which were Ukrainians too), which doesn't make it less valid as a genocide but puts it in another category. Even by
lowest estimate it's third on that list. What you're saying about its death toll is blatantly false, not even considering how callous responding to MILLIONS OF PEOPLE BEING KILLED BY AN AUTOCRATIC REGIME with "b-but.. but it's not the
largest group of people that's ever been killed!" is.
I thought and hoped this board wouldn't have any Soviet apologists in it, and yet...
The Holodomor was the greatest genocide in all of history, and not exactly a "quick death" at the hands of an axe or rifle either. You really can't claim that the October Revolution really made the situation a lot better. It just gave somebody else the stick.
>.>
When the english got to the Americas a century or so after the spaniards left they found stragglers of an apocalypse, what exactly do you call that but genocide whether it was deliberate or not?
What is your
point? How is this related? Yes, colonialism is terrible. Yes, capitalists killed lots of people too. But I don't think the answer is to say "well, those people halfway around the world
also did some killing, so I guess the killing these guys did isn't all that bad, and so I guess we could just go on and trade for the other killing, with the MORE NOBLE motive, because I guess there's no other way.".
EDIT: Oh, and, if you think the Soviet Union is the holy grail for industrializing in a couple generations, remember that imperialist Japan did that too. Oh, and then terrorized China.